On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 20:08:33 +0000, Allen Wooden wrote:

> On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 17:14:53 +0000, Tim Bradshaw <tfb@cley.com> wrote:
>>This isn't answering your question, but we've had a fair amount of
>>excitement with A5200s, and there are two issues which have made
>>things better: make sure the disk firmware is right, and beware of
>>taking disks out of some slots in the arrays. Wrong disk firmware
>>seems to be able to cause intermittent total loss of contact with the
>>array, and removing disks from the wrong slots can cause weirdo loop
>>flapping problems.
>>
>>--tim
>
> Any docs from sun that point to the slots that may give trouble?

It's supposed to be 0,5 & 10 front, and 0,3,6 & 10 rear; something to do
with signal degradation through the array;

It's frustrating; we're losing more than a disk a month to failures on our
5200s (Four full arrays FWIW; so we're still losing over the odds
especially as not all of our disks on those arrays are terribly active);
hell, we lost an 18GB drive today when the 73GB next to it was replaced
due to failure; and these two weren't even in the same disk group, or, for
that matter, imported on the same server. Contrast that with an A1000 on
an E3500 that's been rock solid for us. I've looked at our array firmware
and everything is uptodate; though OS patches are somewhat lacking; I've
not yet looked at disk firmware.

I don't know; the flexibility of the Veritas is nice; but part of me's
looking at A1000s doing mirroring in combination with SDS to replace the
fibre channel; if we can't upgrade arrays due to compatibility (or
manglement approval for budget) what's wrong with extra A1000s from eBay
and brand new disks...